Neighborhood ties: A Camden engineer rebuilds

Five generations of Stettlers have called Camden home. Now Mark Stettler, a native of the city's Cramer Hill section, is helping build the city's newest neighborhoods, as vice-president at one of those essential New Jersey contractors, T&M Associates, the consulting engineers.

Though he once ran for county freeholder against the regular Democratic organization -- he got creamed -- Stettler is a fan of the corporate-labor-nonprofit-political establishment that has secured massive state tax breaks as an incentive for suburban companies to move back to the region's long-battered mini-metropolis.

"George Norcross has been great for Camden. He has everyone working on the same page," Stettler told me as we drove past the fast-rising Holtec Corp. headquarters and power-plant parts factory, where the once-vast New York Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. has stood, largely vacant since 1969. Norcross, a Democratic Party leader, insurance broker, Cooper Medical chairman and unpaid Holtec director, is the force behind Camden's subsidized, corporate led downtown revival.

Stettler's Dad was a butcher who left town when Mark was six. Mom worked in the cafeteria at Pyne Point Middle School (she refused food stamps, but fed her kids sometimes on leftover school-lunch milk and pizza).

His Camden pals included Frank Moran (later City Council President), the Sadlers (Rodney is Chairman of the city Planning Board), and Charlotte Ray (runner-up, Miss USA 1991). Another classmate is doing life for an insurance contract murder. Stettler worked as an underaged paperboy out on 26th St., and later cut meat at his Dad's shop in North Jersey.

"I was the first in my family to go to college," Stettler says. At Rutgers, he started a Phi Kappa Sigma chapter. Juggling jobs and classes, he transferred to Drexel, which he could attend at night. His wife, a Penn Dental grad from central Jersey, fixed teeth for the Air Force; he got a job at an Air Force civilian employee; they saw the world from airbase towns.

His Dad had taught him to stretch a dollar and sell confidence: If you take enough Coke cases on credit, the company throws in a freezer. "I developed a lot of people skills in those kinds of jobs. Which a lot of engineers don't have," Stettler told me.

In 2008, with construction stalling, Stettler took a job teaching pre-engineering classes at Camden County Technical Schools. He did work for the county highway engineers, then joined T&M, a frequent county contractor founded by Richard T. Noble and Dick M. Schultz. Schultz was a classmate of Stettler's wife's grandfather: South Jersey can be that small a place.

T&M clients include the South Jersey Port Corp., headed by Kevin Castagnola (he and Stettler have become good friends since the Holtec project brought them together), as well as Holtec, engineer Krishna Singh's power plant parts company: "He makes those big soda cans they use to hold spent uranium fuel rods and ship them around the world," Stettler says.

The port corporation had taken over the former New York Ship property but didn't nearly fill it. "The area was notoriously problematic," Stettler said, as we passed a couple of women he identified as prostitutes on Broadway, which is being shifted west to cut two sharp corners off Morgan Blvd. "We're hoping to chase that activity elsewhere," he said of the neighborhood's familiar vice.

On its 50 acres, Holtec has half-completed a seven-story office and administration building facing Philadelphia more than a mile away across the gray Delaware River, and at least two much larger manufacturing structures, and such high-end amenities as a helipad. Initial plans call for up to 900 staff, many of them moved from the previous Holtec headquarters out in Marlton.

It's also Holtec's ambition to build a class of small nuclear-electric plants, which could grow to employ several thousand, unlikely as that may seem in this year of cheap natural gas.

Stimulated by Holtec and backed by government grants, Conrail has extended its spur line to serve businesses expanding at the old shipyard site. Among nearby tenants is storage-tank builder Joseph Oat Corp., which is more than 200 years old.

Besides extending the railroad, the county (corrected) has moved Broadway, the city's main north-south road. I ask what it's like digging on riverside industrial ground. "There's not a job in Camden that doesn't have environmental problems," Stettler told me.

As a kid he played on the city's notorious Harrison Ave. Landfill, where scrap-wood and methane fires flared. Cooper Medical and the Salvation Army have built on reclaimed land there in recent years. 

There's spilled fuel and chemicals underground to be sealed or excavated. And older things: "When we moved Broadway we had to do the archaeology," bringing in Richard Grubb Associates from Cranbury (corrected) which unearthed Lenape camping grounds.

It's light soil, prone to crushing under heavy loads. "That's my specialty -- geotechnical engineering," Stettler told me. "The ground here is like very tight sponge. So tight that, instead of shooting water out in minutes when you (pave), it shoots out over a matter of months."

Strip the topsoil and any built materials, and replace it with road materials that are lighter, and the road won't compact under heavy traffic. "Or you can compress it. But we didn't have time for that." They imported bargeloads of light volcanic fill, all the way from Greece.

T&M is also helping rebuild the Camden County office complex  on Mount Ephraim Ave. "It's about a $20 million job," Stettler says.

At the Subaru of America site, on the old Sears property between Admiral Wilson Blvd. and Campbell Soup, Brandywine Realty Trust plans a 5-story,. 250,000 sq. ft. headquarters and 83,000 sq. ft. training center. The soil here has been cleared and is being squeezed by heavy earth -- "surcharged," the engineers call it. Work is to accelerate after testing this summer.

We head up Mount Ephraim Ave., past Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital and the ex-industrial site where NFI, the logistics company owned by the South Jersey's wealthy Brown family (trucking, real estate, warehousing, Sun National Bank), is planning an indoor agricultural facility.

We pass over the Federal St. bridge -- designed in the early 1900s, as engineer Stettler is bound to remind me, by Joseph Strauss of Chicago (corrected), the eventual chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge -- along River Road, past the Pavonia freight rail yard and the light passenger rail train to Trenton.

Contractor Hunter Roberts is putting another Mastery charter school on River Road. It's great to see uniformed kids with young teachers in new buildings. But I'm wondering how St. Anthony's and the other Catholic schools who have survived so long, saving taxpayers millions, will manage this wave of publicly-funded corporate charter competition.

Up in Cramer Hill, every house tells a Stettler story. "My great-grandfather Rickenbach's family owned a shipyard there at 28th and Harrison," he says, pointing over a weedy lot in the general direction of Petty's Island.

He shows me an empty house, and another half-a-house, the last carefully maintained.  "This was all built in Leesport, near Reading, Pa. The family moved it on a scow, all the way down the Schuylkill, up here to Camden," more than 100 years ago. The Rickenbachs built yachts, barges, tugboats. There's a model of one of their boats in the Lightner Maritime Museum, St. Augustine, Fla. Stettler would like to see it in Camden's new maritime museum, set to open on S. Broadway in a former Episcopal church this fall.

Hargrove, demolition contractors and asphalt recyclers, sprawls behind heavy fencing. Behind the Salvation Army's Kroc Center are soccer fields on remediated former landfill. The Farragut Yacht Club endures.   

We drive down to the city's central Delaware River waterfront, site of Liberty Property Trust's proposed billion-dollar office development that is supposed to lure several of suburban South Jersey's remaining corporate and firm headquarters to Camden.

Stettler notes an irony: In this most urban piece of the city, a town served by two taxpayer-subsidized suburban train lines -- here by the wide river, near the recently-departed River Sharks stadium and the indoor performance venue -- here where land parking is a lot more expensive than in the suburbs, the Patco train to Philadelphia and the suburbs doesn't stop.

He points overhead to the Ben Franklin Bridge: Why not put a station there "so people can take the train to the waterfront?"

We find cars jammed to a crawl outside the downtown LEAP Academy charter school as students are getting out. "What will we do with all the traffic?" Stettler puzzles. He's glad to see the city finally trying to separate storm drainage from sewage. He cheers the new Cooper Nursing School building.

I ask the obvious questions: Why go to all this trouble to rebuild this city whose industry and residents have fled? Haven't the people voted with their feet? Won't growth force out those for whom the city is a cheap refuge? Why not leave economic recovery to developers and their property markets?
 
Though he still lives in Audubon, just outside the city line, Stettler responds like a committed urbanist: In Britain, one of the places he worked in the Air Force, "they don't have a lot of land. They are very cautious about overbuilding," he says admiringly. "They keep things small. They are very careful about expanding across borders."

In South Jersey -- in America, across the suburbs where half the people now live -- "we've built more than we can sustain," Stettler tells me.

Without new construction to help pay for maintenance, roads and sewers wear out; they cost too much to maintain without paying a lot of taxes -- though that's really a decision for local voters, he adds.

Even from close-in suburbs like Audubon, "commuting time is a big issue. Well, not to pick on Evesham, but at least Audubon is next door. Who wants to live where it takes an hour and a half to get in and get out? It used to take 15 minutes.

"All that is lighter fluid for our barbecue. All this you see," he gestures to the Economic Development Administration tax breaks, the state's new roads and charter schools, the government- and investor-funded hospital expansion, "this is our Kickstarter. We have reached critical mass. Enough projects are now underway. The next step is when we see private money coming in."

When I worked there at the end of the 1980s, Camden was full of immigrant restaurants. There's a McDonald's downtown, which has been there almost since the old White Castle shut, and student sandwich joints, and neighborhood places. "They are getting the foot traffic" that will soon attract more joints, he assures me.  

"We got some good stuff going," Stettler concludes. "We are fortunate to be adjacent to Philadelphia, which has a lot going on." He laughs, looking across the river to the city, with its population 20 times Camden's 80,000. "There's nothing wrong with a little Philly-Camden synergy." (Revised 6/23)